Monday, May 19, 2014

Understanding Promotional Videos

By Ryan Stone


The promotional video is the most amorphous type of video you can create. As the name implies, this type of video promotes...something, anything! It could be a business, a product, an event or even just aiming to raise a brands profile. Confusion is also compounded by the fact that people use the terms promotional video and corporate video interchangeably.

Stylistically, and creative the promotional video can take any form but no matter how soft the selling approach is within, it must ideally create a return. To do so it should target its ideal audience but remain as universally appealing as possible to raise as much awareness and reach as many people as possible.

To achieve this level of universal appeal the video content should be light enough to avoid alienating or confusing your audience and ensure you include some sort of call to action at the end to encourage response. It could be argued that promotional videos are not unlike television adverts albeit not constrained to the 30-second timescale. In this way promotional videos have more opportunity to include further information, interviews, talking heads and testimonials.

Furthermore, online, attention spans are short and indulgence in branded advertising is rare. Therefore, many promotional videos take a soft-sell approach using an abstract concept and delivered in a light-hearted or humorous way. This approach has been coined as 'Advertainment', obviously a hybridisation of advertising and entertainment. Notable videos include 'The man your man could smell like' promo from Old Spice, the Evian Roller Babies, Ken Block's Gymkhana for DC Shoes, or any of the GoPro aspirational shorts.

So, a promotional video for your business will be a light-hearted, soft-sell approach. To really stand out however, you'll need to devise a clever concept, and possibly splash out on actors, locations or props.

In the next series of articles we'll examine the structure and definition of other video marketing formats that you can use to raise the profile of your business online, engage with new customers and of course, sell more.




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